Binfield Cricket Club's Friendly XI won by 117 runs away at Ham & Petersham CC on Sunday 26 July 2026, posting 268 for 5 from their 35 overs on the back of Ben Clark's century - 100 from 87 balls with nineteen fours - before captain Peter Henly took 4 wickets for just 5 runs from his 7 overs to hold Ham & Petersham to 151 for 8.

Don't let the gentle word 'friendly' fool you, my dear old things. Binfield won the toss on a warm Sunday afternoon, chose to bat, and proceeded to make 268 for 5 from 35 overs - and then their captain bowled a spell so miserly that it very nearly qualifies as an act of theft.

It began about as badly as an innings can without actually catching fire. Charlie Miles went for 14 with the score on 15, caught by Ham & Petersham's Lee Scholtz off the bowling of Prabhat Kumar, and one ball into the very next over Ram Devarakonda followed him, caught by their wicket-keeper Chas Warlow off Andrei Baranov, for a painstaking 1 from 15 deliveries. Two down, fifteen on the board, and Ham & Petersham with every reason to fancy their afternoon.

What followed was Ben Clark, and it was quite magnificent. He made exactly 100 from 87 balls, and the shape of it is worth dwelling on: nineteen fours and not a single six, which is to say that seventy-six of his hundred runs came in boundaries struck along the ground. There was nothing agricultural about any of it. Binfield went from 15 for 2 to 171 for 3, a passage worth 156 runs and well over half the eventual total, the bulk of it built by Clark alongside Joshua Snelling before Clark reached three figures, retired not out and gave somebody else a turn. That is the spirit in which these games ought to be played.

Snelling made a handsome 46 from 53 with four fours and a six, and the finish was quite riotous. Jaden Slaughter struck 30 from 28, and then Rahul Gupta produced the innings' most brutal cameo - 29 not out from 13 balls, four of them fours - with Carter Daines unbeaten on 9 from 5 beside him. Binfield took 25 runs from the final over alone, the most productive of the entire day, and closed on 268 for 5. Thirty-four fours in all. What a joy!

And now the theft. Ham & Petersham had reached a perfectly serviceable 80 for 3, Chas Warlow was set and the required rate, while steep, was not yet absurd. Then Binfield's captain Peter Henly brought himself on to bowl and took the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh wickets - Lee Scholtz bowled, Prabhat Kumar bowled, Anish Butani stumped by Binfield's keeper Carter Daines, Bentley Bowen leg before - and in the space of twenty-five runs the innings simply ceased to exist. In seven overs of bowling he conceded five runs in total, and four of those overs were maidens, meaning not a single run came off them. An economy rate of 0.71 - well under one run per over - in a match where 419 runs were scored is the sort of number one reads twice.

The worm bears it out plainly: Ham & Petersham were 80 after fifteen overs and only 105 after twenty-five - twenty-five runs in ten overs while four wickets went down at the other end. Warlow deserves enormous credit for what came next, because he was the one man who refused to be hurried. He carried on to 59, adding 45 for the eighth wicket with Roan Kumar before falling leg before to Binfield's Rahul Gupta at 150, and Ham & Petersham closed on 151 for 8 with a good deal more dignity than the middle of their innings promised.

So: a century, a four-wicket spell for five runs, and a 117-run win to take home down the long road home. Ham & Petersham were generous hosts and had, in Warlow's 59 and Prabhat Kumar's 2 for 24, two performances well worth the admission. But this was Binfield's afternoon from the moment Clark got going, and first-rate stuff it was.